somewhere i have never traveled
by CherryFlavoredChalk
Summary: After the Fall, Sherlock tries to delete John and company and doesn't entirely succeed. Mycroft, e.e cummings, and a few enemies help him along.


Playing dead is immensely fun at first.

He's in Tipperary, cocking the side of his mouth and whistling the whole way down the road, where he knows a smiling group of well-polished men will greet him at the bar and try to slip tranquilizers into a glass of scotch. He's running through the streets of Kabul, ducking his head and breathing in through his mouth. He's in Yokohama, romancing the daughter of the CEO, who keeps the company's computer codes tattooed on the inside of her thigh in a series of hieroglyphics so clever that he almost doesn't want to wince whenever they have dinner together.

He's in New Zealand, wondering why the subtle strains of Mendelssohn make him want to bite his lip.

"Sherlock," says Mycroft witheringly (and Sherlock is glad for it, if only because he needs that small slice of winter that his brother's willing to inject into his voice, if only because he needs something to counteract the oppressive heat of Missouri), "have you given any thought to what—"and there's a peculiar buzzing noise that isn't the gnats or the planes flying over his head.

"Talk sense, Mycroft, or don't talk at all." Sherlock tugs at his collar and wonders why he's wearing a necktie. He faintly remembers leaning to the side and murmuring to someone that he wasn't in the practice of wearing them, but—who? Does it matter? He excuses it as being irrelevant and reties the Windsor knot at the base of his throat.

Mycroft snarls. "It would behoove you to be less flippant. There are consequences for your actions, you know, as much as you wish there weren't."

"Well, yes," Sherlock says, agreeable as he hasn't been since he was six, "aren't you just the paradigm of that?" He waves to one of the few interns that doesn't inspire ire, and steels himself against flinching when she winks back at him.

His brother is silent. And then he says, quietly, "You're certainly right, at least in one respect."

* * *

><p>It's April when things become unsettled.<p>

Sherlock is darting around one of the clubs in Queensland when he's caught between the electronic music that he's been faking an enthusiasm for and the utter uncertainty that he's not quite sure why he's doing all of this. The running, the seducing, the relentless rubbernecking of call girls and business tycoons and next-door neighbors. He wakes up every morning with the metallic taste of desperation in his mouth, and he never knows why.

Someone presses him a joint and he says, "Pass, mate!" in a voice two octaves higher than his natural timbre. It's one of the girls he'd met earlier—immaculately curled hair, nose ring, the holder of some convoluted major, hiding a Ladysmith somewhere near the curves of her generous hips. Ena Addington.

"Hullo!" She smiles brightly at him, with a gap that must be endearing to people who aren't him. "Just trying to lighten you up a bit, sunshine, you look down as all hell." Ena laughs, and he tries to focus solely on her, but there's so much chaos in their surroundings that he finds it nearly impossible and entirely too frustrating.

Ena watches his forehead crease minutely, and leads him towards the alley nearby the club, where she grins winningly at him before pressing the Ladysmith into his breastbone and hisses, "Well, this is proof enough that you're not dead and buried, I suppose. Fancy having dinner?"

Ena Addington is Irene Adler with nearly a year off from being The Woman. She's playing at being The Girl at a graduate university, where she has created a façade of being both comely and naïve. She sits cross-legged on the paisley divan and fixes him with a stare that would make Sherlock fidget if he was a lesser man.

"Where's that man of yours?" Irene asks over couscous,.

"I couldn't possibly understand what you mean."

Irene raises an eyebrow. "Have a bit of domestic?"

Sherlock scowls and tugs at a cowlick. "Either state your reasons for detaining me or allow me to leave." But Irene leans forward and only spares him a quick look that suggests that he ought to be less pert unless he wants to revisit the Ladysmith being jabbed into him before saying impatiently, "I mean, where is J—"

-And Sherlock hears nothing but the rushing of the ocean and a hundred bees murmuring together in perfect synchrony.

* * *

><p>He's in Nice when he turns suddenly in his chair and reaches out for a cup of tea that doesn't immediately settle into his hand. Something about this jars him, so he wastes an entire afternoon lying prone on the floor, shuddering so slightly that one could've mistaken it for breathing.<p>

Santa Fe has everything the color of clay and fast, fast Spanish that makes Sherlock intensely grateful for his childhood obsession for translating every speech that Che Guevara ever made. He's at Canyon Road when a man wearing a dark suit nods at him briefly and leaves a thin envelope in the satchel he's been using as part of his Young Tourist look.

When he steals away to the bathroom, there is a picture of a man with closely-clipped grey hair and a firm jawline. Neatly written underneath it is a poem that he faintly remembers being penned by Kipling:

_wonderful little our fathers knew.__  
><em>_half their remedies cured you dead_

Sherlock is holding a squirming man under the sink of a Holiday Inn and threatening to kill his mother and mistress when he misses Lestrade so fiercely that he almost bangs his victim's head against the faucet. It's entirely unexpected—there's a million memories crowding in his memory all at once, of standing at crime scenes while Lestrade sighs at his side, of eating dim sum at five a.m. after the worst stages of withdrawal are over, of learning what Lestrade's first name is when he's high as a kite and forgetting it instantly.

Sherlock closes his eyes tightly, and when he snaps the man's neck his only regret is that he cannot perfectly recall the exact way Lestrade taught him to.

Three months later, when Sherlock is still infiltrating Moriarty's web in Lestrade's name, he gets a photograph a gently smiling woman with as many wrinkles as pearls around her neck and the gently curling script of: _ah, happy days! when hope was high,__and faith was calm and deep!_

He thinks, unbidden, _Martha?_ It discomfits him enough that he flushes the cocaine he's been sold in the slums of Portugal and spends the entire night flitting around the room, waxing rhapsodic about Irish poetry and about the weight of motherhood (which is thankfully consistent with his cover as a slightly maniacal Literature major—he can't be expected to cause it to go balls' up because of sentiment).

During one of their rare phone calls, Mycroft says, "Have you remembered the most vital one?" The end of the sentence is punctuated with a well-worn snippet of anxiety

Sherlock is in Providence, standing knee-deep in the ocean. "What?" he says irritably. He hasn't had a proper bath in nearly four days and the smell of salt sticks to his skin even when he scrubs in the sinks at gas stations.

Mycroft sighs, a rush of static. Sherlock's fingertips twitch and he thinks, _bees. _He thinks, _the ocean and rivers and English Breakfast because we are Englishmen and Mendelssohn and red Christmas sweaters and the way a ripple of water looks almost like a wrinkle, like the ones Lestrade has and Mrs. Hudson has and—_

Sherlock nearly falls into the sea.

* * *

><p>He comes very close to being murdered by a sociopathic adolescent that could give Jim Moriarty a run for his money and almost ruins everything. He's gasping in the hospital rooms that he remembers telling a warmly sold shape that he ardently despises, under the grounds that it was unnecessary because "After all, you're my—"<p>

It feels like 'friend', but that can't possibly be right.

Mycroft keeps sending him impeccably dressed strangers with slight envelopes in their hands to help him along, but Sherlock dodges all of them. He knows this is important, he ought to remember it. There are times when he presses his nose into wool, when he's watching people babble passionately about Afghanistan, when he stirs a lump of sugar into his tea and thinks absently that there was someone, once, who preferred their tea without it—and then the thought is gone. It's tiring, and he thinks about it incessantly whenever he's breaking into a computer system or when he's sneering in the faces of the cowardly followers of Moriarty's murderous, deranged parade.

When he finally kills Moran, the man laughs through the bubbling of blood around his mouth and says, "Where's your right hand mad man, Holmes? You're starting to look a bit tragic."

Sherlock is Ipswich, in Northumberland, in bloody _Newquay_—

-and he can't help but feel that it's time to be getting home.

* * *

><p>He's having a cup of tea that he can never seem to make just quite right when he notices the photograph (a peculiar shot of only the lower-half of a face with a bristling blonde stubble on the shin that indicates anxiety and a pursed mouth that means an unhappiness that has settled so far into the man's being that it now swims in his own bloodstream) the letter pinned to the lapel of a freshly ironed suit. It's written shakily, as if in a rush. It's the only message he's received so far that's actually in Mycroft's handwriting.<p>

_(i do not know what it is about you that closes_

_and opens; only something in me understands_

_the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)_

_nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands_

Sherlock doesn't intend to fall to his knees, but it happens anyways.

* * *

><p>When he arrives in London, he has over thirty pseudonyms under his belt, the letter that had been fastened to the suit and is at least eight pounds lighter, which means he's made a direct transfer from slender to skeletal. He scared no less than three passengers on the Tube, and seems to be dripping blood from his knuckles.<p>

But he feels good, he feels better than good.

Sherlock climbs the fire escape to get into 221B (to avoid Mrs. Hudson, mostly. He isn't quite ready to see her yet, if only because he's almost 100 percent certain that she would suffer some sort of fainting fit) and is in the process of lifting up the window when he sees a face so starkly welcoming that he almost drops off the side of the sill and kills himself again (and he's had quite enough of that).

"Bloody fucking hell," says John Watson. He is wearing a jumper the same color as his wide eyes. It has a small tea stain on the collar, and Sherlock loves him so much that he thinks he might burst with it.

"Hello, John," says Sherlock blithely, because he is quite possibly as moronic as the cretins at Scotland Yard, "It has only suddenly struck me that this may be an inconvenient for you, but I can't be bothered to care."

-And then he almost dies for the third time (which is dreadfully dull) when John yanks half of his body into the flat and hugs him so hard that his heart stutters and murmurs something that is a conglomeration of "you are a fucking git", "took you long enough" and "not even a call, honestly, have I taught you nothing of manners?" (which is interestingly not dull at all).

When they are curled up in John's bed (Sherlock's bed is still covered in lab equipment, which John says that he never moved because he "couldn't be arsed to do it" but appears to be a lie by the way that the doctor flats his lips), he presses his forehead into the pillow and whispers, "John, everywhere was ruined and impossible without you".

He can feel it in John's hands that the doctor wants him to elaborate, but he feels sick to death with it all. Months dedicated to ripping apart Moriarty's organizations, and he couldn't remember who he was doing it for in the beginning. Sherlock's half terrified that he tried to delete Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade and John; the only difference is that the first two will never know, but John Watson will be able to guess it in his shaking hands.

But John is quiet. Then: "There was a moment, you know. When I thought maybe I couldn't hack it after all. There was the bathtub, and a bottle of that French wine that you don't like to drink."

Sherlock's mouth twitches. He wants to shout _what a completely stupid idea _and _you aren't allowed_, but he remembers the sea in Providence, the smog of Kabul, and a tittering employee of Moriarty's that had asked if he still had that "boring little sidekick" to play Ophelia for him.

"John,"—he says it like a prayer, but he hasn't believed in a power higher than himself since the age of seven. It is absurd, to fall apart when he's finally managed to come back home. It isn't logical, but Sherlock cries anyways, and his shuddering body hums like a lullaby.

* * *

><p>It's February in London when Sherlock stands in front of John and says uneasily, "If- If you wish to be close to me, I and my life will shut very beautifully." His clenching fist says <em>if you'll have me<em> and recalls a night when he'd turned to the right, pupils dilated and expectant, and had met the stiff air instead of another person. All those nights had been lonely and aching, even if he'd been unaware.

-And when the teacup crashes to the ground and the good doctor rises to greet him with a smile nearly splitting his face in half, Sherlock finds home in John Watson and breathes every scent of English Breakfast and peace back into his lungs.


End file.
